BAGHDAD — A prominent Sunni Arab lawmaker kidnapped nearly two months ago was released Saturday, delivered to the prime minister's office by men whom she described as religious Shiites who initially considered her an enemy because of her sect.

The lawmaker, Tayseer Najah al-Mashhadani, was abducted along with at least seven bodyguards on July 1 in eastern Baghdad while driving to a session of Parliament. Members of her political bloc, the Iraqi Islamic Party, said an escaped bodyguard described her captors as Shiite militiamen. Afterward, the party boycotted Parliament for weeks, complaining that the Shiite-led government was not doing enough to rein in such militias.

In an interview on Saturday, Mashhadani described an abduction and release that raised questions about the government's connections to the kidnappers.

"At the first moment of my kidnapping I was so scared," she said. "They captured me, blindfolded me and took me into a house in Baghdad. I stayed there for four days."

The kidnappers then took her to a plain two-story house in another area of the city. A family lived on the first floor. She said she spent most of her time in a room on the second floor, where she was watched by two guards who prayed several times a day.

"They usually tried to make me feel O.K.," she said. "They said, 'We are Iraqis like you; we will never hurt you. You are here under our protection.' "

"I talked to the guards about religious ideas and political information, and I usually tried to avoid anything controversial that would make problems between us," she said. "I talked about things that we all agreed with."

Still, she cried every day for the first three weeks, she said. When she asked why they kidnapped her, they said that they wanted Shiite detainees released and that she deserved it because she was Sunni.

"They didn't understand the real situation in Iraq," she said. "They thought all Sunnis were terrorists. I had to explain that we want this country to develop. We want it to be stable here."

Sometimes, she said she would ask the guards to change the channel on a TV near her room to Al Iraqiya, the state-owned news station, so she could hear whether she had been forgotten. She said she had been encouraged to discover that prominent Shiite and Kurdish politicians often agitated for her release.

Then on Friday, Day 55 of her ordeal, her kidnappers said it would soon be time to go. Her release, they said, would come Saturday or Sunday. She said they did not say why.

Haider Majid, a spokesman for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, initially said that she had been brought to Maliki's office because Mashhadani wanted to thank him, though Mashhadani had little control over her own movement.

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Indeed, Mashhadani's release was a surprising denouement to a day that started with Maliki addressing the first of four conferences for a national reconciliation program. With hundreds of sheiks appearing from all over the country at a Baghdad hotel, it was the biggest gathering of tribal chieftains since the American invasion in 2003.

Maliki used the media-drenched event to emphasize that American troops would only leave Iraq if Sunnis and Shiites could prove that they were working together, seeking peace.

"Liberating the country from foreign powers and cutting off the hands of enemies who want to harm Iraq," he said, "cannot be done without national unity and national consensus."

It is unclear what role Maliki or his office played in Mashhadani's release. Members of her political party and Majid, the prime minister's spokesman, declined to discus the issue.

But for Mashhadani, the drama started earlier, around 3:30 p.m. when she was blindfolded for a final time and taken from the house where she was held. After some initial driving, she was put into to a second vehicle. She was told that she was safe and with people from the office of the prime minister.

The bag over her head was removed, and she realized that she was in an armored sport-utility vehicle that was part of a six-vehicle convoy. "They said, 'We are Maliki's people and he wanted you alive,' " she said.

"I finally felt comfortable," she said. "I finally believed I would get home to see my family."

She shared lunch with Maliki and prayed. Then a member of her party took her home.

Three of her guards are still being held. And the long-term effects of her release, along with the meeting in Baghdad of various sheiks, remains to be seen. Controlling the violence and chaos here continues to be difficult.

In Baghdad on Saturday, 20 bodies were found throughout the city, many with gunshot wounds to the head. A car bomb near a Shiite mosque in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, killed 3 people and wounded 17. Armed militants also shot a Shiite family in the southern suburbs of Baquba on Saturday, killing four people, including two women.

There were also signs that the local autonomy many of the sheiks demanded from the government on Saturday would not necessarily lead to order: earlier this week, looters ravaged a military base near the southern city of Amara after British troops withdrew.

"It was handed over to a corrupt authority, and they started looting the camp and stole all the belongings such as furniture, air conditioning units and generators," said Sheik Abdul Kareem al-Muhammadawi, a prominent tribal leader in Amara. "What do you think the attitude of an ordinary citizen would be when he sees official forces looting official belongings by this way? The camp was looted and completely destroyed and instead of being used as an academy it became a bare land."

"This camp was built by Iraqi resources which were allocated for reconstruction, and unfortunately there is no official in this government who can take the blame for this," he said. "If the official is the thief at the same time, so how can you expect discipline from ordinary people?"